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»This imposing work contains some of the most powerful, even tortured music Silvestrov has ever written«
– Gramophone
The world premier recording of one of Valentin Silvestrov’s major symphonic achievements marks an important addition to the Ukrainian composer’s rapidly growing discography on ECM. Since 2001 the label has addressed his creative output in a number of releases that encompass a variety of genres. These include chamber works (“leggiero, pesante”, ECM 1776), choral music (“Requiem for Larissa”, ECM 1778), works for piano and orchestra (“Metamusik / Postludium”, ECM 1790) and the extraordinary song cycle (“Silent Songs”, ECM 1898/99). Now comes the almost hour-long Symphony No 6. Composed in 1994/95 and revised in 2000 it concludes the sequence of great orchestral works that Silvestrov wrote in the 1980s and 1990s.
It was in “Stille Lieder”, dating from the mid-70s, that the composer first employed his so-called “metaphorical style” in which echoes of long-lost sounds and poetic allusions are integrated with a highly developed sense of form. Symphony No. 6 is cast in five interrelated movements that all circle around the creation, transformation and final fragmentation of a melody. Silvestrov: “I try to compose by ear, to create the entire form as melody. The melodies should be viewed as something more than symbols or themes; they are more akin to a process than a result.” Tatjana Frumkis notes in the CD booklet that “throughout Silvestrov's symphony every line of the ‘subject’ can be retraced in all its ceaseless metamorphoses (...) The ‘labyrinth’ becomes more and more convoluted and tumultuous. Question and response, inhalation and exhalation: the living tissue of sounds, charged with deep dynamic force, sparkles and breathes as if bathed in sunlight or caressed by gusts of wind.”
In an interview with UK magazine Gramophone (July 2003) Silvestrov spoke of the work’s “atmosphere of imminent disaster”.. Although there is no explicit autobiographical element to the work the composer included a tribute to his wife Larissa in the concluding bars (in Russian solfeggio the notes A-D-C read “La-ri-ça”) which he was later to interpret as prescient. She was to die suddenly and unexpectedly, shortly after the completion of the first draft of the symphony, in August 1996 . In the following year Silvestrov poured his grief into the “Requiem for Larissa” convinced it would be his last composition. (It was not until 2003 that he was able to begin work on his seventh symphony.)
Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra
Andrey Boreyko Conductor |
